Used Car Sales & SEO: Two Tales Of Woe

Sites around second-hand car sales tend to be heavily invested in online. However, due to tired legacy e-commerce platforms and challenging listing issues, sometimes their SEO problems can add up to massive traffic and conversion headaches.

Today, I’ll take a walk though some of the more painful issues for site architecture and their solutions.

Local Dealerships & Indexing Woe

With 3.6 million indexed Google listings, you’d expect every car type possible in their inventory — and you wouldn’t be far off! But when you kick the tires (sorry!) on their local dealership subdomain,razsor.autotrader.co.uk, you’ll find a confusing blend of 200 Page OK header responses, 301 redirects, and 302 redirects.

The upshot is that these pages should all be 301 redirecting to local dealership sites, but this is not happening consistently. As a result, Google is failing to follow the 301s thatare implemented correctly, and this is causing pages on the subdomain to be indexed (when really, the local dealership site should be the only version indexed).